Dear Gloria: You and I share a similar passion. My idea of the perfect weekend is a trip to the coast with PLENTY of goodie bags to collect treasures in – colorful rocks, shells, odd driftwood pieces, dried seaweed bits, and other assorted pieces of flotsam and jetsam! That’s the easy part, now what do you do with all your treasures?

We have done a number of coastal/shell projects for various television shows over the last few years, and it seems that the look is becoming much more popular lately. As you mentioned there are the old stand-bys of picture frames, etc., but even these can be elevated from a “craft” project to high design, depending on the design pattern you work out and the type of shells you use (just last month Art and I were browsing through some of the design stores on Robertson Blvd in Hollywood and a shell encrusted mirror had a price tag of $2,500.00!)

Basically any piece of furniture can be the basic canvas for your shell art, and the project can be as simple or complex as you want t make it. For a Christopher Lowell Show we created a “coastal corner” with a small cabinet, a display case, and a chair all lavishly covered in a variety of exotic shells. We added some accessories, also shell incrusted to finish the look. If you are going for his type of “over the top” look you will probably need to buy shells to add to your own collection since our part of the world does not have a large variety of shell types. Although shells can seem relatively expensive when you price them in the small bags that they are sold in at craft stores, most companies that sell shells (including loose ends) have bulk pricing available that makes them much more affordable.

When adhering shells to a surface you want to consider the final use of the piece as that will help determine the type of adhesive that you use. Although a glue gun and hot glue seems like a logical choice, anyone that has worked with a glue gun at all knows that items that will be handled very much will tend to have pieces “pop” off. There are many “quick bond” adhesives that work very well with shells, or if you are creating texture, plaster can be a good medium to work with. I have also created my own mix with spackle and beach sand mixed together, spread over the surface of my piece, and the shells embedded into the mixture.

Maybe your taste runs to something a bit less lavish – consider putting together a collection of different shaped glass containers, group them together and fill them with your “finds’. This can be very simple, yet dramatic when the containers are of interesting shapes and the contents are grouped by color, shape or type. I even have a McMenamins’ quart jar filled with clam fossils I found after a storm, and it has a place of prominence over my sink. If you have broken bits and pieces, stuff that really doesn’t deserve it’s own display space, consider using them as “dressing” around candles or plants.

Are you a driftwood person too? If so, some of those pieces make fabulous wall art, just hung up “as is”. On one trip Art and I found a few pieces of “branch roots” that had washed up from who knows where. These pieces are large and heavy and are a “cone” shape, with varying degrees of hollowness inside. Using nautical rope, Art fashioned “slings” for the cones and we planted them up with succulent type material, garnished with, what else – a few shells!

You know, this is a subject that I could go on about for days (and pages). Shells have fascinated people from the earliest recorded history and entire gardens have been created around their theme. If you are really interested in shell art there are some great books out there that can give you LOTS more information, and INSPIRATION! My best advise – keep gathering, the more you start to play with your treasures, the more ideas that will come to you. Happy collecting and creating!